LucyTheApe writes:
The problem for evolutionists, is to show how code can be inserted into the genome.
As Wounded says, research has demonstrated this innumerable times. Some were described in the predecessor thread, and in
Message 3 in this thread Bluegenes presents a couple of them again. So when you ask:
The problem is how do you discern whether new functionality has been added.
This is precisely the question that Bluegenes has already answered for you, before you even asked. Let me summarize in a bit more detail this time by pulling some information out of the articles.
First Bluegenes mentions the douc langur monkey, and he provides this Science Daily article as a reference:
Gene Duplication Adapts To Changing Environment, which poses this question:
Science Daily writes:
Evolutionary theories assert that some of these duplicated genes may acquire new functions and take on new roles. But exactly how do these changes occur? And do they, as scientists suspect, really help organisms adapt to their environments?
That's pretty much the same question you're asking, right? It turns out that while most primate species have one RNASE1 gene, the douc langur monkey has two, RNASE1 and RNASE1B. Genetic analysis revealed that the RNASE1 gene was duplicated about 4 million years ago, and that the original has remained largely unchanged while the duplicate experienced rapid change. We know which is the duplicate because it's in a different location in the genome from where RNASE1 gene occurs in all other primates.
And so today, unlike most other primates, the douc langur monkey has two flavors of RNASE1 genes. One is the original RNASE1 gene that carries out the original function of producing enzymes that "digest dietary RNA" and "degrade double stranded RNA". And the other is the new RNASE1 gene that also digests dietary RNA, but much more efficiently for the lower pH levels of douc langur intestines.
So whereas before there was one gene, the RNASE1 gene, performing two functions, one of them not very well, we now have two genes. One, the original RNASE1 gene, is still performing its original function. The other, the new RNASE1B gene, is performing one of the functions of the RNASE1 gene, but much more efficiently.
Bluegenes' other example concerned yeast. The title of the article he cited was
De Novo Origination of a New Protein-Coding Gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and it appears in the journal
Genetics.
The article describes the BSC4 gene in
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a gene thtat does not appear in any of its closely related cousin species. The corresponding sequences in those cousin species are non-coding, in other words, they represent what are commonly referred to as junk DNA. But in
Saccharomyces cerevisiae the BSC4 gene encodes a 132-amino-acid-long peptide that appears to contribute to DNA repair during periods of starvation. Random mutations in the non-coding area transformed the non-coding DNA into a coding gene.
So there we have two examples of the appearance of new genetic material, one in the douc langur monkey through gene duplication followed by mutation, and another in
Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast through the change of non-coding DNA into coding DNA through the process of mutation.
--Percy
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